Abstract »It’s widely recognized that during its lifetime, civil engineering structures are subjected to adverse changes that affect their condition and structural safety. These changes are due to several factors such as damage and deterioration induced by environmental aggressions, design and/or construction errors, overloading, not expected events such as earthquakes or simply due to the normal degradation associated with the normal use of the structure through their working life. In this way, the application of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) systems to these civil engineering structures has been a developing studied and practiced topic, that has allowed for a better understanding of structures’ conditions and increasingly lead to a more cost-effective management of those infrastructures.
In this field, the use of fiber optic sensors has been studied, discussed and practiced with encouraging results. These sensors present several advantages when compared with the more traditional and used electric sensors, such as their immunity to electromagnetic interferences and corrosion, their ability to withstand high temperatures and their small dimensions and light weight just to name a few. Furthermore, with distributed fiber optic technology it’s possible to measure virtually any point along a single fiber allowing for truly distributed sensing measurements with great spatial resolution. The possibility of understanding and monitor the distributed behaviour of extensive stretches of critical structures it’s an enormous advantage that distributed fiber optic sensing provides to SHM systems. These distributed fiber optic sensors (DOFS) when bonded or embedded in the structural material works as its nervous system and for all these reasons, it is acknowledged as the most promising fiber optic sensing technique.
In the past decade, several R&D works have been performed with the goal of improving the knowledge and developing new techniques associated with the application of DOFS in order to widen the range of applications of these sensors and also to obtain more correct and reliable data. This paper presents, after a brief introduction to DOFS, the latest developments related with the improvement of these products as long as a review of their diverse applications on structural health monitoring with special focus on engineering structures.

Authors

Biography:Mr. Barrias completed his graduation in 2013 at FEUP (Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto) in Civil Engineering – Structures specialization. During his graduation he enrolled in the Erasmus programme at the Czech Technical University of Prague. His master thesis consisted on the study and design of a new road bridge between the cities of Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia.
After his graduation he made an IASTE internship at Technischen Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany for two months where he worked in the Department of Geotechnics.
From February of 2014 until August of 2015, he was a full researcher at LABEST (Laboratory of Concrete Technology and Structural Behavior) at FEUP where he was involved in the research programme entitled “GNSS and accelerometers data fusion in large structures monitoring”.
Currently, he is a Marie-Curie fellow at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya where he is working towards a PhD degree with the subject "Development of optical fibre distributed sensing for SHM of bridges and large scale structures" within the TRUSS ITN project.Linkedin